India slams Pak on human rights plaint at UN

New Delhi: India has hit back sharply at Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif for his critical remarks about the status of human rights and minority rights in India and Jammu and Kashmir at the UN General Assembly. India termed Sharif’s remarks as "false accusations" and "done to obfuscate misdeeds in his own country." India countered Sharif by underlining Pakistan’s role in sheltering terrorists and carrying out terror attacks in India.

"It is regrettable that the Prime Minister of Pakistan has chosen the platform of this august assembly to make false accusations against India. He has done so to obfuscate misdeeds in his own country and to justify actions against India that the world considers unacceptable," first secretary in the Permanent Mission of India to the UN Mijito Vinito said in the Right of Reply at the United Nations in New York.

Vinito said, "A polity that claims it seeks peace with its neighbours would never sponsor cross-border terrorism. Nor would it shelter the planners of the horrific Mumbai terrorist attack, disclosing their existence only under pressure from the international community. Such a country would not make unjustified and untenable territorial claims against its neighbours. It would not covet their lands and seek to illegally integrate them with its own.”

“But it is not just about the neighbourhood that we have heard false claims about today. It is about human rights, about minority rights and basic decencies. When young women in the thousands from the minority community are abducted as an SOP, what can we conclude about the underlying mindset?," Vinito said.

The official said the desire for peace, security and progress in the Indian subcontinent is real. "It is also widely shared. And it can be realised. That will surely happen when cross-border terrorism ceases, when governments come clean with the international community and their own people, when minorities are not persecuted and not least, when we recognise these realities before this Assembly," said Vinito.

In his address to the UNGA, Pakistan's PM had said that while Pakistan looked for peace with India, "sustainable peace and stability" in the region was contingent upon the resolution of the Kashmir issue. He also mentioned India’s abrogation of Article 370, which scrapped special status for Jammu and Kashmir. Sharif said, "The officially sponsored campaign of oppression against India’s over 200 million Muslims is the worst manifestation of Islamophobia."